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Nancy Bradeen Spannaus, author and historian, 1943-2026
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Nancy Bradeen Spannaus of Lovettsville, VA, author and public historian, died on January 16, 2026 at Inova Loudoun Hospital. Nancy had been fighting cancer over a span of eleven years, and was battling a rare and particularly virulent form of the disease for the past two years.
Nancy had been studying U.S. history, with an emphasis on the country’s economic development in general, and Alexander Hamilton in particular, since the 1970s, and in 1977 she co-authored a book of writings on the Political Economy of the American Revolution. In 2017, upon retirement from a career in journalism, she established the blog https://americansystemnow.com, which contains more than 600 articles on the history and principles of the American System of Economics.
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Recent Posts
Part 1-The American System at Work: Steel for the World
By Anton Chaitkin – Editor’s note: This is the beginning of a projected five-part series, which will tell the story of the rise of the U.S. steel industry as it has never been told before. The first two parts are excerpted from Anton Chaitkin’s Who We Are: America’s Fight for...Read More »
From Nancy’s Pen: Hamilton Launches the Federalist Papers
One years ago, in 2025, American System Now founder, Nancy Spannaus, posted the following article on the anniversary of the first of the Federalist Papers that were intended, and succeeded, to mobilize the people of the American colonies to ratify the U.S. Constitution which was already under serious attack. In...Read More »
THE PATRIOTIC SPIES WHO SECURED THE REPUBLIC
by Jeff Steinberg- With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 formally securing the independence of the United States, the Continental Army, along with the espionage networks that played such a vital role in winning the war, was dismantled. With the Treaty signing and the withdrawal of...Read More »
Is the United States a “Christian Nation”? How the Revolutionary Wartime Baptists Fought for Religious Freedom for All
What would Baptists at the time of the American Revolution have thought about the notion that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, an idea which is being heavily promoted in many conservative and “evangelical” circles today? The answer might surprise you. This question was among the topics...Read More »
From Nancy’s Pen: To What Does Our Constitution Commit Us?
As we conclude Constitution Week, on the 238th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of the United States, we revisit Nancy Spannaus’s reflections on the little-understood, fundamental principles of that document. The following post was published in September 2017, just a few months after Nancy’s founding of this blog....Read More »
Let Freedom Ring! On the Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Historic Speech to the March on Washington, August 28, 1963
By Michele Steinberg Sixty-three years ago, on a single warm August day, some 250,000 people, mostly Black Americans but many others of different races and religions gathered in Washington, D.C. for a “March for Jobs and Justice.” At this historic event, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the...Read More »
Christian Zionism at War with America’s Founding Principles
Part II of an interview with Dr. Clifford Kiracofe, Jr. author of Dark Crusade: The Israel Lobby and Christian Zionism. By Michele Steinberg – Part I of this interview was published on July 22, 2026. We discussed how the Founding Fathers were absolutely opposed to any sort of...Read More »
Reaching for Hamilton at the ‘Sputnik Moment’
Jake Sullivan has authored a very important piece in the Council on Foreign Relations’ magazine Foreign Affairs entitled “How to Reindustrialize America – The Case for a Strategic Investment Fund.” American System Now believes that any significant attempt to resurrect Hamiltonian economics and methods in the U.S. (see the summary...Read More »